The best smartwatch you’ve never heard of

Specs and performance

Features the Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 2100 chipset / 512MB of RAM

4GB of storage for music and apps on your watch

No LTE connection on the watch, but may be a new version with it soon

The Ticwatch Pro features a lot of the top-end spec you’d want in a smartwatch. It’s running the Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 2100 chipset, which is the most recent version of Qualcomm’s wearables chipset, and which we’ve seen powering most watches of this type for the last couple of years.

The Wear 2100 also powered the Ticwatch E and Ticwatch S, and as with those watches we found the speed and power of the Pro to be satisfactory for a smartwatch of this type. It’s only using 512MB of RAM, and while that may sound limited on paper it’s enough to keep this watch chugging along in both its smartwatch and Essential modes.

If you want to listen to music on the watch there’s 4GB of storage, but that’s also space you’ll be using to keep apps and notifications on your watch, so you won’t have a huge amount of space to work with for music, audiobooks and other media.

For listening to your tunes you can connect Bluetooth headphones – we found the pairing process quick and simple, and the connection reliable the entire time we were using them.

There isn’t an LTE version of the Ticwatch Pro yet. We’ve heard from Mobvoi that it’s considering introducing a new version of the watch with its own internet connectivity, but so far there’s been no official announcement.

That means that if you want to get notifications and use the internet when on the move you’ll need to take your phone with you. There aren’t many LTE-capable watches on the market at the moment, but it’s still a shame not to see this feature built into the Ticwatch Pro.

Software and app

You'll need both the Mobvoi and Wear OS apps on your phone

Works with both iPhone and Android devices

Wear OS may take you a little time to learn, but it's easy to use

The Ticwatch Pro itself runs Wear OS software, which is much the same as we’ve seen on existing Android Wear watches. Google has since rebranded its platform to reflect the fact that more and more iPhones users are embracing devices on the platform.

Wear OS is a much more mature system than it was a few years ago, and it rivals all the big platforms for smartwatches.

You have access to all the Wear OS apps in the Google Play Store – it’s a limited selection compared to what’s available for smartphones, but it’s one of the widest ranges for a smartwatch OS.

The user interface is easy to learn and use. You’ll be using the two buttons on the side of the watch, as well as tapping on the display to move through the menus.

Getting to grips with the software on your phone is less straightforward. You can connect the Ticwatch Pro to your phone using the Wear OS app for either iOS or Android, but to confuse matters there’s also the Mobvoi app.

The watch demands that you download this, but its functionality is notably limited. It’ll record exercise data such as your step count and other activity in the Fitness section – as opposed to in the Wear OS app – but apart from that it’s limited in functionality. This is where you’ll see the breakdown of your exercises recorded in the Fitness app on your watch too.

The OS is easy to use on the Ticwatch Pro, but the phone app doesn’t impress us and we’d like to see Mobvoi enable some new features and give the app a bit of a redesign. Plus we do find it a bit irritating to have two apps on our phone – sometimes you’ll be wondering where you need to go to find the information recorded by your watch.